it goes on and on
by EriLenx07
Summary: There is no such thing as the perfect solution. Post-canon, one-shot.


In a perfect world, Sawada Tsunayoshi's second time saving the world and all the people he loves in it would have gone something like this:

The Arcobaleno Flame jar solution works perfectly. The Flames renew themselves constantly and are more than enough to continuously circle through the earth's leylines. The world is balanced, the curse is undone and everyone is happy.

That being said, if this was a perfect world then this problem probably wouldn't have existed in the first place. This is, unfortunately, reality—not the world of the perceptions of an innocent child nor the daydreams of an adult who has seen too much.

So, it goes more like this:

In theory the jars are perfectly fine, but ultimately there's just too much space to cover to keep the world in balance. The jars can't keep up, can't cycle the Flames, however powerful, fast enough. They aren't truly alive either, aren't some derivative of bacteria or something of the like—they can't produce Flames, they can only work with what they have.

However, they are the containers for vaguely sentient objects with but one goal in mind, so intricately suited towards it that they can even go as far as to troubleshoot themselves.

Their previous hosts are no longer attached, no longer viable. They'd probably reject the burden if given it again, in anycase.

Not an option.

But then again, why would they need to be? After all, there were newer, better options available. There was a Sky, so close, so bright. There were his Elements, fresh and strong and desperately attached.

Such a lovely, lovely power source, wouldn't you agree?

* * *

Tsuna was twenty-six when he first noticed that he didn't look a day over twenty-two.

Now, it should probably be noted that Tsuna had always looked a bit younger than he actually was. When he was thirteen he had looked around ten, when he was fifteen he was too often mistaken for twelve.

So really, he couldn't be blamed for not noticing the change, or the lack thereof, in this case.

When he had first noticed, he'd been looking at a picture. It had been his twenty-second birthday and he had been happy. Everyone had, in their own subtle (or not) ways—the softer tint to Kyouya's eyes, the genuine quirk of Takeshi's lips. It was in Hayato's affectionate gaze over the photograph's inherent chaos that he may or may not have started, Ryohei's warm arm around Tsuna's shoulders. It was in the way that Mukuro and Chrome were actually in the picture and not lingering in the background as they often did in the past, the infectious energy of the children as they eagerly awaited their slices of cake.

Maybe this wouldn't have been possible in the far past, maybe not in the future that had not been. But they had been through too much together, too many life-or-death situations to be so immature as to remain separate after so long.

Sure, Mukuro and Kyouya's bickering still involved some property damage and yes, Ryohei was probably still a bit too loud. Takeshi was still fond of playing the oblivious fool, as Chrome still liked to pretend she was innocent and quiet until it suited her to be otherwise. Hayato still slipped back into his old, worshipping habits every now and then and much to Tsuna's chagrin, Lambo was still a brat.

But still, they had grown up.

Tsuna looked at the man in the picture, the him of the past, then looked at his own reflection. True, he wasn't supposed to look much older, he never did. But that didn't mean that he hadn't ever aged—in between the ages of eighteen and twenty, subtle lines had appeared on his forehead from furrowing his eyebrows too much. His muscle definition had changed, improved. He'd grown an inch— said that he'd probably grow an inch more.

He'd grown half an inch.

When he looked at twenty-two year old Hana in the photo, for example, and compared her to the Hana of now, he noticed a change. He noticed her face thinning as she shrugged off the last of adolescence, the way that her frame no longer looked as lanky in her business clothes now as it did back then.

She was different and he was not.

But then again, is it really that significant? His Guardians hadn't changed either—except Lambo, who was now going on eighteen.

Perhaps it was normal, perhaps it was a Flame thing. Reborn hadn't ever warned him about anything like this, but then again Reborn had never gotten to the age of twenty-six, he'd only just aged back to sixteen now.

There was an odd, familiar feeling nagging at him, telling him to pay attention to this, but Tsuna was nothing if not willfully ignorant of anything that did not suit his tastes at the moment.

It made things easier, it always did. It was easy to be ignorant of his own transformation from a normal boy to the king of vigilantes, to his developing friendships with people that common sense said are too dangerous to be friends.

After all, Tsuna had grown up giving up. He had grown up giving up on making friends, on doing better in school, on making his mother proud.

Giving up was easy and easy things hurt less than harder ones, like failure after trying so hard to no avail, like rejection and disappointment. Easy things felt good and now?

It was just the easy thing to do, to put down the picture and walk away from the mirror.

* * *

Tsuna was forty and he still looked twenty-two.

* * *

Sasagawa Kyoko was an illusionist by trade.

It made sense. She'd spent years pretending to be okay, pretending that she hadn't thrown up in the sanctity of her bathroom after seeing Ryohei's injuries that first year, that she didn't know exactly how dangerous what they all were doing was and that she'd never experienced an anxiety attack over that knowledge either.

They had other things to worry about than her, Kyoko had once explained. She didn't need to worry them, didn't need to add one extra problem to that already full plate.

Tsuna vehemently disagreed with that confession, that she shouldn't have been so quiet and happy-looking over it, that she shouldn't ever do that again.

He said he'd make it an order if he had to, to this eighteen year old Kyoko who had written her own name on Vongola's payroll, who was sick and tired of her longest standing illusion.

He couldn't stand the thought of her suffering, he loved her too much as he always had, as he did every one of them, if a bit differently than he used to.

And for all that Tsuna vehemently hated the boss-way of doing things, even he slipped every now and then, even if the words had shamed him the moment they left his mouth.

She'd laughed that tinkling bell laugh, kissed his cheek and told him that that was _very cute of you, Tsuna-kun_. Then she left his office and his flabbergasted expression, demanded real illusion training from Chrome, (_so sweetly_, Chrome would later describe) and somehow got into a relationship with Mukuro, of all people.

Tsuna didn't know how that happened either, but then again, maybe he did. Kyoko liked doing the unexpected, when she had finally freed herself of her own constraints.

And over the years, Kyoko didn't age quite right either. When she was thirty she looked about twenty, youthful and dainty and very Kyoko. When she was forty, she seemed to be in her late twenties, experienced with a confident gait and all of the right proportions and skin textures for a woman of her supposed age. When she was sixty, she had the almost-stern looking features of a forty-five-year old that had been aging well. She looked about the same at sixty-nine, on her last day.

When she was seventy in her casket, when her heart had finally failed her and her mind had gone away, she didn't look twenty or thirty or forty.

She looked ancient, like nothing more than skin and bones, like the illusion that she had made to soothe her brother, her friends, her husband, had finally weathered away and all that was left was Kyoko, the brittle Kyoko who had pretended everything was okay then, that everything had been okay now.

Tsuna looked at her, at the body and then at himself and he noticed that he was still twenty-two. He looked at Ryohei and Hana, looked at the way that it looked more like Ryohei was Hana's young attending doctor than he did her husband standing beside her wheelchair, still dressed in his medical uniform from the day before. He looked at their son and saw that the boy looked older than his father, more a brother than a progeny. That Ryohei had grandchildren, yet still he was twenty-two.

Mukuro was often harder to pin down—he usually looked an indeterminate age. If you looked at him one way, then he was probably something like thirty. Another, fifty. But now, tired and cold and angry, unable to be bothered with whatever feeble concentration his illusions took these days, he looked as twenty-three as he did seventy-two.

Tsuna looked at his own son, all regal-looking and grown-up, still heir Vongola at age forty because Tsuna couldn't bear to think that his little boy was big enough yet to lead.

Tsuna wasn't that old, he often laughed, and his son is still young. There's time yet, for irritatingly long inheritance ceremonies and mountains of paperwork. _Enjoy your youth_, he had said to the son that was older than him, _let me handle all the hard stuff. _

But now, here he was, at the first funeral amongst those that he had grown up with, suddenly struck by the situation he found himself in.

Tsuna looked at his little boy and wondered if he was going to be at his funeral, too.

* * *

"Not to sound insensitive," Shoichi said, tearing his eyes away from his computer screen, "—but this is amazing. From a scientific perspective," he hurriedly added.

Hayato's storm green eyes narrowed, his jaw clenched. He was thirty-five and his colleagues at the university still thought he was a grad student, every now and then. "Get to the point already," he snapped.

"Right, right, sorry," the scientist apologized. "So I've spent the past couple of days analyzing your cells, reproducing them in culture, with a focus on their life cycle—I figured that's where the, um, problem was."

"Was it?" Tsuna asked politely, panicking on the inside. Something about that look in Shoichi's eyes, the consistently apologetic lilt to the man's voice, set him on edge and he was always on edge now, whenever he looked into his own reflection and saw things that he didn't want to see.

Shoichi nodded. "Yes. Are you familiar with what telomeres are?" Tsuna shook his head.

Hayato looked torn between tsk'ing in disappointment and reassuring Tsuna, which was reassuring in it of itself. It was nice to see how somethings loosened and changed. It made him feel less static. "They're a part of chromosomes, Tenth. They shorten every time a cell divides, until they can't divide anymore."

"Right," Shoichi confirmed. "They're actually thought to be one of the principle mechanisms behind aging and it's been theorized that if we can stop the shortening of telomeres during cell division, then we can stop aging entirely. The only real proof of this has been seemingly immortal cancer cells, whose telomeres don't shorten at all during cell division, until now, at least…"

"So, you mean…"

"Yes," he said, gravely. "Your telomeres, in all seven cases, haven't shortened at all throughout their time reproducing in culture. In other words, you guys are now the first definitive proof of the telomere immortality theory."

"But why?" asked Takeshi, of whom had been content to remain on the sidelines for now, to listen and absorb science that he had always felt that he had no business trying to learn, what with the way that his brain has never been quite suited to it. "It seems like a pretty big coincidence, for it to be happening now, to us of all people."

Shoichi shrugged, as helpless looking as Tsuna felt. "I don't know. It could have to do with Flames, but that's more Verde's expertise than mine. I'll give you a copy of my results to give to him."

* * *

Lambo's eyes were watering again and Tsuna wished he could be fondly exasperated instead of fighting back tears of his own.

"I-pin's older than me, I think," Lambo said. His voice quivered like he was freezing cold in the winter air, as though his warm furs and fluffy curls had no bearing upon his soul. "That… Tsuna-nii, it doesn't make sense! My birthday was first, I was born the year before her!"

It was hard to believe, that Lambo was twenty. Especially since he always looked around seventeen if one was being generous—he had stopped earlier than the rest. Tall and broad-shouldered but ultimately lanky and baby-faced.

Tsuna looked in the mirror on the door to his office and he understood. He pulled the boy who would never be a man into his arms and felt his sobs wreck through Tsuna's own small frame.

"I know, Lambo. I know."

* * *

They were eighty, except Tsuna was going on twenty-two; Chrome, twenty.

Chrome sat before the cold, sad, almost-meaningless stone, her legs crossed on the wet soil. Tsuna was behind her, leaning against a stone that he had leant on just as hard before it was ever a stone.

"Isn't it strange, Boss?" Chrome asked, her voice as intangible and quiet as it always was. "She's been gone a long time, but I can still feel her. She's haunting me, Boss."

Tsuna knew, Tsuna knew all too well the power of ghosts. The chains that Daemon Spade had tied down the Vongola with, the pure, uplifting inspiration of Giotto that had gotten him through many a battle.

But he also knew the power of those who weren't so easily seen.

He knew the burdens of the Ninth's leadership and his mistakes, he knew the sinking terror that he could possibly become thoughtlessly cruel enough abandon his family for his work, like his father had before him.

"It's not strange at all," Tsuna answered. "She's only been gone for ten years."

When had _ten years_ become _only _ten years?

"Maybe," she agreed. "How long will she be here?"

"As long as you keep her here." Chrome was never very good at letting go. "Maybe as long as you'll be here."

"That's a long time, Boss."

"I know."

* * *

Hayato and Takeshi tried being in a relationship when they were one-hundred and twenty-five.

Much to Tsuna's guilty expectations, it crashed and burned when they were one-hundred and thirty-one. They refused to speak for another ten years, were awkward about it for twenty more. It took a total of thirty-six years for things to go back to normal.

Tsuna hated how he could barely call it a long time anymore.

* * *

"If you'd let me, then I could probably study this forever."

Upon analyzing those damnable telomeres, Verde had come to the conclusion that not only were the telomeres not shortening, but they were covered in a Flame type only known to occur in relation to the Arcobaleno pacifiers—Night Flames.

Furthermore, about a quarter of as quickly as the Vongola Tenth Generation could produce them, their Flames were disappearing, drawn away by something.

But here's the thing—Tsuna doesn't want to give him forever. Hell, he doesn't even want to have forever for himself. He just… he just wants to be normal, for once in his goddamn life. To live and to die like any other man.

And so, for once, he does something that he's never been allowed to do, something that any normal man would do.

Sawada Tsunayoshi rages. He confronts Talbot, the Vindice, even Kawahira, the cagey son of a bitch.

It doesn't do anything.

There is no perfect solution.

* * *

Tsuna has a son. He doesn't have a wife, having long since decided romantic relationships weren't for him, but he has a son.

Tsuna didn't want to be a husband, but he wanted to be a father. It wasn't hard to find a surrogate, Haru, who had long since grown out of her childhood crush, had volunteered. She hadn't wanted to be a mother, there was no time for that when she had better things to do, like solving world hunger and getting a settlement up on Mars. But she did want a child that looked like her, a child that didn't need her but liked her anyways.

Haru wanted to be an aunt to a child who had her blood. Tsuna wanted his own child to love and be there for like his own father had never done for him. It was a win-win situation, honestly.

God, did Tsuna love his son. His son was determined and likable, the way that Tsuna apparently was, but had all of Haru's talent and poise.

Sawada Ieyasu was as close to perfect as any human being ought to get and there were no words to describe how much Tsuna loved him.

Tsuna watched him grow up, watched him fall for one of Ryohei's daughters, watched him get that business and advanced mathematics degree that Tsuna would never have been good enough for. He watched him find his own Guardians, passed on Natsu and watched on with a smile.

Tsuna got Natsu back when he was one hundred and twenty-two.

* * *

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, Kyouya liked to travel a lot. Sometimes he'd be gone for a few months, other times Tsuna could go for ten years with nothing more from the man than obligatory phone calls every now and then.

Kyouya was like that.

He had this weird thing with Chrome that Tsuna never quite understood, where she dated whomever she chose, whatever man, woman or person it was, while he was gone, sometimes while he was still there, but still allow him to settle down with her when he was here, let him have his arm around her waist, let him be the father of the child that she decided she wanted to have.

Kyouya had always taken the whole immortality thing better than the rest of them, Tsuna thinks.

Once, Tsuna asks him how he does it, how he can possibly leave his daughter behind so often, for so long.

Kyouya looks at him as though he belongs back in middle school. "This isn't Namimori," he says and takes a sip of his tea and yeah, okay, fine, Tsuna gets that.

Kyouya's never been good at staying in places that aren't Namimori for too long, in places that he can't control. But Chrome is sick of some of the ghosts in that town and Tsuna knows that Kyouya would never be hypocritical enough for her to demand that she stay there, that she perform all her duties from afar the way he does.

"Fair enough."

* * *

"You know this isn't healthy."

They were in an extravagant house in Venice. It wasn't too big, but it had a flair to it.

In the house, Kyoko was serving tea. She'd always been a fan of making interesting, odd teas and then serving it out to her loved ones and other guests. She said it made her feel like she was taking good care of them.

She'd always thought she had to take good care of them, since she had stopped hiding.

Chikusa was on the couch across from them, flipping through some textbook on aerodynamics, the subject he had studied in college once he had caught up to everyone else. He picked up his tea and sipped it; Tsuna could almost hear him breathe.

In the backyard, Tsuna instinctively knew, Ken must be there, napping or running or something like that. Practicing, maybe. He'd been a pretty good basketball player, way back when.

Tsuna looked pointedly at the psychiatry degree hanging on the wall.

Mukuro chuckled. "Do as I say, not as I do, Vongola."

"Bullshit," Tsuna said. "Do you really think that they'd want this?"

"There's a reason why we fought about once a month or so, Tsuna-kun," Kyoko, forty-five-looking, answered instead, elegant, amused and tired.

"Don't talk to me through your illusions," Tsuna snapped. "This isn't right."

"Isn't it, though?" Mukuro questioned idly and somehow, Tsuna knew that wasn't tea in his cup. "We will, no matter how much we try not to be, here for eternity. Can I not have my simple pleasures in the hell we've been lost in?"

Simple pleasures, huh.

"Besides, can you really say that you're any better? The way you haunt their graves— your mother, your son, Reborn. Don't you have better things to be doing? Doesn't your grandson need your guidance?"

Tsuna looked away. "You should have had children. You'd get it then, I think."

Mukuro laughed, empty and hollow. "Oya, do you really think I would have made a good father? Really, me of all devils?"

Tsuna, one hundred and thirty-four, sighs and drinks his tea. When Ryohei joins them and gazes longingly at not-Kyoko over his cup, Tsuna doesn't say a word.

* * *

"I'd like to see , please," Tsuna says to the hospital receptionist. She doesn't look up.

"Do you have an appointment?" the woman asks, in a bored monotone. Tsuna finds her lack of reverence refreshing.

"I'm his brother," he says, not quite answering. The receptionist hadn't been looking for one anyway. "I'll see if he's available."

Ryohei did everything to the extreme—it was in the way he loved, how he fought, how he healed. He'd gotten his medical degree pretty quickly too, completed an accelerated pediatrics program then made a name for himself as a miracle-worker within a year of his residency.

Nowadays, he moved from hospital to hospital when people started asking all the wrong questions, maybe dying his hair or wearing fake glasses. Ryohei was the personification of life itself—he always made the best of everything, even immortality.

Even if his wife and sister were gone, if his daughters were elderly and had long since moved on, if his grandchildren had forgotten him, Ryohei didn't give up. He kept on caring for people, his patients, Tsuna, his Family.

They could all probably learn a thing or two from Ryohei, Tsuna thinks. And when he sees Ryohei's brilliant, sunshine grin after a successful operation, he thinks that maybe, just maybe, this whole eternity thing isn't so bad after all.

* * *

Tsuna visits the Varia, once. He doesn't quite know why he does it, but he has this insatiable urge to go spend a morning in the resident murder-mansion.

He thinks that they had had a nice, violent sort of peace, back in the old days. He asked them to do things, they said 'no, fuck off', but if Tsuna watched the news later that day or another, he was likely to see something about the terrible and mysterious death of the person he had put out the hit on, coincidentally enough.

Mildly passive (in a word) aggressive or not, Tsuna recalls seeing the core Varia officers at all the Vongola events, seeing Squalo sparring with Takeshi in the Iron Fort, seeing all the clashes and the unspokenly unhesitant collaborations when the need arose.

And so Tsuna goes and he visits. There is a man sitting on the sofa in the entrance hall.

His hair is long and blonde but not too long, his demeanor soft and unassuming but Tsuna knows the deadliness lying underneath. Tsuna remembers him as a small child, sitting by his grandson's side at all those politicking functions, pleasantly deterring anyone whose intentions seemed questionable.

Tsuna remembers approving of this boy very much.

"Decimo-sama," greets the head of the Varia.

Abruptly, Tsuna realizes that this man is not Xanxus.

How does one breathe, again? "I'm sorry," Tsuna chokes out and he doesn't know who he's speaking to, the man or the portrait behind him.

Tsuna turns around and leaves. He feels the burning red eyes look down on him as he goes.

* * *

Where the others had long since found other things to do, places to see and people to be, Hayato had always been right by his side.

It was so silly.

It wasn't like everyone wasn't a constant presence in his life, no he got phone-calls and texts and pictures and emails. Sometimes Takeshi liked to stay for years at a time, before something big caught his interest and Tsuna shooed him out of the house with a smile and a promise to call every night.

But then, there was Hayato.

Tsuna always felt bad, hoarding Hayato like this. Their relationship wasn't a romantic one, not by a long-shot, but there had always been something comfortable about it since they had grown out of their awkward teenage insecurities.

But it was something good, something that didn't change. However, Tsuna knew that Hayato was wasted on him.

The man had seven different degrees under different names by the time they were one-hundred. Several different discoveries, breakthroughs, advancements for the human race.

And yet, still he just liked staying by Tsuna's side. He said it made him the happiest—Tsuna didn't disagree. But there was a difference between just feeling happy and being fulfilled, so Tsuna took it upon himself to safeguard that part of Hayato, the part that he would rather kill than give up any part of being with Tsuna.

It was a nice little role-reversal, he thinks.

So he watched him, one of his dearest friends, took note of any interesting academia going on that Hayato spent a bit too much time looking at and then he _pushed. _He pushed for the other man to go there, wherever, to participate and exercise that incredible intellect and not to stagnate as Tsuna knew that he himself had.

Dragged him there himself, if he had to.

Sometimes, Tsuna had to wonder if this was all he was good for anymore.

* * *

"You know I won't be here forever, Dame-Tsuna."

"So?" Tsuna looked up from the paperwork documenting Takeshi's utter slaughter of the perpetrators of a child-trafficking ring in Sweden. "Neither will I."

_I am not immortal, I will not be here for eternity. _

_I will not be a mafia boss. _

"I didn't teach you to drown yourself in self-delusion."

When had Reborn gotten so old, again? When had his pitch black hair started gaining those streaks of grey, when had his sharp cheekbones start having those subtle wrinkles?

It was unfair, it was so unfair. It terrified Tsuna. Tsuna had always had Reborn, after all—the one teacher who had never given up on him, the father he had always wanted and took too long to realize he finally had.

"I'm not," Tsuna protested weakly. "But there's always a solution, isn't there? We've always found one before."

Reborn shakes his head slightly, but his lips quirk up. "That's a bit better. Now go run twenty laps around the courtyard."

"What? But Reborn, I'm working now!"

"You're getting lazy. Twenty-five."

"Reborn!"

"Thirty." He punctuates this with a gunshot towards the open window, one that Tsuna has to tilt his head just slightly to dodge.

"I'm going, I'm going," Tsuna says desperately, laughter just barely hidden underneath, warming under that ebony gaze of approval.

* * *

Twenty years later, Tsuna stands before a stone and promises, "I'll see you on the other side."

_Renato Sinclair_

_The World's Greatest_

_Tutor, Father, Friend, Grandfather_

* * *

Tsuna finds himself drinking sake with Takeshi once, during the break-up period.

"You're both idiots," Tsuna says, his lips loosened by the ethanol.

"Probably, yeah," Takeshi agrees, as easy-going as he always likes to be. "But it's kinda weird, you know? There are so many new things these days, but none of them feel new enough."

"You don't want something new."

Takeshi wants the Family, his father, Squalo. In that order, Tsuna sees how happy he is whenever they have a Family get-together.

"Maybe," says the Rain. "I tried again, you know."

So did Tsuna, after his son was gone. He knows the others have had their moments of feeling too old, too. "That went well, I guess."

"I'm still here," Takeshi laughs, differently from how he laughs when he learns a new sword form or when he hears a particularly good joke, or when he's with them, those that he can still find it in himself to love. "So, by your standards, pretty well."

"Why did you do it?" Tsuna asks, even if he knows the answer.

"Oh, you know," Takeshi shrugs and pours himself another cup. "The temper and that silver hair."

Tsuna doesn't really, but he thinks he can understand. He's never liked romance, stopped feeling it long before he'd even turned thirty, but he'd be lying if he said that he never missed Haru and her fiery brown eyes snapping at him for being too easy on their son, for not pushing him enough and not giving out enough responsibility.

"Yeah," he says, taking another, longer sip. "I guess I do."

* * *

There's laughter in the air. Tsuna can close his eyes and let himself be consumed, by the warm scent of hot chocolate, by Lambo's fluffy head in his lap and Ryohei's warm arm over his shoulders.

Chrome is telling them all about this silly actor she's working with now and Mukuro is commenting on some complex this kid obviously has. That man really needs to stop wasting away in his house and get back into the clinics, Tsuna thinks with a smile on his face.

Takeshi is thoughtfully saying that he may have met this person, Hayato rolling his eyes and saying that Takeshi's met practically everyone these days, the busybody. The conversation turns to some new chemical compound Hayato's developed and that odd wave of funding his current university's received for it.

Everyone looks pointedly at Kyouya who does nothing but take another, slightly amused looking, sip of his tea. Tsuna thinks its adorable, how Kyouya never actually admits to doing anything remotely helpful or soft—it was so very Kyouya of him.

Lambo is bragging about the new language he's mastered, some African dialect whose name Tsuna can't pronounce and for a moment, Tsuna has to admit.

Maybe it isn't so bad after all, if this is the way that it will always be, the way that it will always go on and on.


End file.
